HTC said Wednesday that it had countersued Apple, asking the International Trade Commission to halt sales of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod in the United States.

An HTC spokesman declined to comment on the patents themselves, referring a reporter to the U.S. ITC.

Apple filed suit against HTC in March, citing ten patents involving multitouch and other applications in a complain with the ITC, and twenty more in a civil suit alleging patent infringement. Observers wondered whether the original suit was an indirect attack against the Google Android operating system; a day later, Google itself weighed in, saying that the company would "stand behind the Android operating system and the partners who helped us develop it."

"As the innovator of the original Windows Mobile PocketPC Phone Edition in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008, HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible," said Jason Mackenzie, HTC's vice president of North America, in a statement. "We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones."

The patents include numbers 6,999,800, covering power management of a smart phone; 5,541,988, and 6,058,183, which cover personalized telephone dialer technology; and 6,320,957, which covers telephone dialer with "easy access memory". A fifth, patent 7,716,505, was approved on May 11 and covers power control methods for a portable electronic device.

The patents do not appear to overlap any of those that Apple itself asserted in its earlier complaints.

On April 19, the administrative law judge of the U.S. ITC set a target date for the completion of the investigation tied to Apple's complaint at 18 months, or June 6, 2011.

Editor's Note:This story was updated at 2:01 PM PDT with the actual patents in question.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
More »